Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 3

Fun fact about proving your citizenship!

My kid was naturalized along with my wife (her mother) a couple years ago. My kid is still a minor, and cannot apply for a certificate of naturalization until she turns 18, and then it's anyone's guess how long the DOGE-neutered State Dept will take to issue her piece of paper.

In other words, you can be naturalized as an infant and have no way to prove it until well after your 18th birthday.

A Mexican-American friend who lives here on a Green Card and is the mother of five US citizens, including a US Army Vet and an LAPD officer, just collapsed into my arms crying, saying that she no longer drives on the freeway because she's afraid of being stopped by ICE and kidnapped.

Any Wikipedians wanna weigh in on this? Someone's edited my bio to change the name of my grandmother's birth city on the grounds that "there is no more Leningrad." Yes, but there certainly was when she was born there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cory_Doctorow&diff=1295262366&oldid=prev

Rules for sushi

The most Cascadia airport sign ever.

I'm about to take a two-ish week sabbatical so I can (once again!) rewrite the Trump chapter of my *Enshittification* book (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025), and so that I can get my (thankfully very treatable) cancer irradiated:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/30/gone-fission/#seattle-portland-london-manchester

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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Farewell (for the moment); and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/30/gone-fission/

#Pluralistic

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HEY #SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival THIS SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!

https://www.cascadepbs.org/festival/speaker/cory-doctorow

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Patients.

Linda McMahon, a scammer, has thrown 5.3 million student borrowers into collections, calling them "irresponsible." Another 5.59 million will enter default in the next six months. She's opened the door to for these ex-students to have money taken out of their Social Security and other government payments, leaving them only $750/month to live on (this figure hasn't been inflation-adjusted since 1996).

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Each time they get dinged, another $20 in fees (for having their money taken away) will be added to their debts.

As David Dayen writes for *The American Prospect*, McMahon is also unleashing America's scammiest loan servicers on student borrowers:

https://prospect.org/education/2025-05-27-borrowers-besieged-student-debt/

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Take Maximus (owners of the Default Resolution Group), which has been repeatedly sued for misleading debtors, illegally taking money out of their accounts, and failing to note which borrowers were legally protected from having their funds taken. DoE loan servicers have a long and dishonorable tradition of ripping off debtors, like the giant Navient, which was eventually barred from servicing student loans altogether:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-bans-navient-from-federal-student-loan-servicing-and-orders-the-company-to-pay-120-million-for-wide-ranging-student-lending-failures/

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Servicers like Maximus routinely fail in their legal obligation to inform debtors of their rights, and when debtors know their rights - for example, the right to contest wage garnishment - Maximus just ignores their paperwork:

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6rc8r76c/qt6rc8r76c_noSplash_41d21b1b129a7224ae49ae65621f8dda.pdf

Dayen cites a long list of Maximus's documented sins - for example, systematically failing to inform debtors that if they enter loan rehabilitation and make nine payments over ten months, they can avoid default.

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Every time a borrower completes this process, they come off of Maximus's books, so it's not hard to see why Maximus would fail to tell them about it.

The rules are *incredibly* complex. If you *do* enter loan rehabilitation, you can still have payments garnished from your paycheck until you've completed five separate payments.

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You can consolidate your loans - and possibly even get them canceled after 20-25 years - but that also erases any credit you've managed toward debt forgiveness, and starts piling interest on the new loan. If you get any of this wrong, you have to pay more every month, not less.

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The CARES Act ordered Maximus to stop taking money away from debtors - but some workers had their paychecks docked for *17 months* after the order went into effect, including borrowers who had already paid their debts in full:

https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/SBPC_AWG_Final.pdf

Buried in all the complexity around student debt are several obscure, difficult to navigate paths that can reduce or eliminate your payments.

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These scam agencies charge thousands of dollars - up to 40% of your outstanding debt - for either doing nothing or doing something you can do yourself, but can't readily find out about. This can net them tens of millions of dollars, extracted from desperate debtors:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/panda_prosperity_complaint.pdf

There's about to be a hell of lot more of those desperate debtors kicking around.

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But these are almost impossible to find (the Office of Federal Student Aid's website devotes 39 words to them, several screens down the page). This has created an opportunity for a giant scam industry that takes desperate debtors' last dollars to fill in paperwork they could easily complete for themselves, or to *pretend* to fill in that paperwork and just walk away from them:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/actions/monster-loans-lend-tech-loans-and-associated-student-loan-debt-relief-companies/

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Pell grants are being taken away from anyone who isn't a full-time student with a 30-hour courseload (so the poorest students, who have to work part-time while they go to shcool, will be shut out of them).

Where will students get the rest of the money? From predatory lenders. Private student loans currently pay for 7% of borrowers' education expenses - soon, it could be 90%.

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The DOE is cutting $330 billion out of the student loan pool in order to fund Trump's tax-break for the ultra-rich. This will make government loans much more expensive for borrowers - but it'll also vastly reduce the amount that students can borrow through the government. The lifetime cap on undergrad loans is now $50k, and $100k for grad students.

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